Did Sea Life Arise Twice? 238
eldavojohn writes "Dr. Adam Maloof has found fossils of sea sponges in Australia from 650 million years ago. You might think this is no big deal unless you consider that sea sponges were thought to have arisen 520 million years ago. These fossils predate the oldest hard bodied fossils we have by a hundred million years. Dr. Maloof is now wondering if life might have arisen twice after the first attempt was quashed 635 million years ago: 'Since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the Snowball Earth.' So how is it that life survived the Marinoan glaciation? The BBC has a video on the topic and Wikipedia has a time line of the Proterozoic Eon into the Paleozoic Era."
Evolution finally refuted (Score:5, Funny)
You know how they say evolution would be falsified by a bunny in the pre-cambrian.
Well, it's not a bunny, but it's not in the stratum it's supposed to be.
Time to stop teaching the discredited theory of evolution.
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:5, Funny)
You know how they say evolution would be falsified by a bunny in the pre-cambrian.
Well, it's not a bunny, but it's not in the stratum it's supposed to be.
Time to stop teaching the discredited theory of evolution.
*stares blankly for a moment*
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:5, Funny)
"All well and good, but just exactly when is intelligent life due to evolve"?
- Kevin Gilmer, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne England, 18/8/2010 14:48
Click to rate Rating 5
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A more interesting question would be - have we had intelligent life before on Earth?
Just consider that intelligent life doesn't necessarily mean that there was technology involved. If the intelligence was used for a philosophical society or that the entities having intelligence didn't have hands then the development of tools would have been harder.
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:5, Funny)
You know how they say evolution would be falsified by a bunny in the pre-cambrian.
Well, it's not a bunny, but it's not in the stratum it's supposed to be.
Time to stop teaching the discredited theory of evolution.
Not to mention that General Relativity and Quantum Relativity don't mix... obviously they are both wrong and we can quit teaching Newtonian physics in school too! I think we are really on to something. If we weed out all the nonsense being taught, we will have enough time in the day to bring back art class!
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we can quit teaching Newtonian physics in school
I'm fairly certain you were being sarcastic in your post but relativity doesn't invalidate Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics is still correct, it's just less accurate than relativity and quantum mechanics.
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we can quit teaching Newtonian physics in school
I'm fairly certain you were being sarcastic in your post but relativity doesn't invalidate Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics is still correct, it's just less accurate than relativity and quantum mechanics.
Newton was a hack... That apple was perturbed, I tell you, PERTURBED [wikipedia.org]!!!
(Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics are close enough for me, at least to make jokes about)
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Not to mention that General Relativity and Quantum Relativity don't mix... obviously they are both wrong and we can quit teaching Newtonian physics in school too! I think we are really on to something. If we weed out all the nonsense being taught, we will have enough time in the day to bring back art class!
Surely you mean "bible class.". Art class is still for decadent elites.
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Huh? Why would finding some earlier animal life falsify evolution? This article reeks of crappy reporting and someone trying to make a discovery sound bigger than it is. I'm waiting for some moron to shout "paradigm shift" next.
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You know how they say evolution would be falsified by a bunny in the pre-cambrian. Well, it's not a bunny, but it's not in the stratum it's supposed to be. Time to stop teaching the discredited theory of evolution
You won't find any. God didnt make mistakes hiding those sneaky fossils everywhere. Unless he did it on pourpose to test your faith, but in that case the allknowing one would had not know something. Life has become a bit more complicated since we stop letting the young Occam to play with scissors, knives and other sharp toys.
Dating methods are accurate! (Score:5, Informative)
Most dating methods that are used routinely are accurate; that is why they are used. Carbon 14 is typically NOT used for objects older than 45,000 years, when it becomes useless. For older objects, other methods are used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating [wikipedia.org]
.
Re:Dating methods are accurate! (Score:5, Interesting)
***Most dating methods that are used routinely are accurate***
True, but unhelpful. Dating techniques useful for dating rocks deposited millions of years ago mostly depend on the use of "index fossils" (fossils that are widely distributed but change enough over time to pin a date down fairly closely.) Less commonly, radiometric dating can be used, but that requires that an event (typically volcanic) reset the atomic clocks in the rocks in question to zero. Since pouring lava over a fossil tends to destroy it, radiometrically dateable fossils aren't all that common. There are a few fossils found between lava flows or buried in volcanic ash that can be dated with fair precision. One especially important set is a collection of difficult to interpret fossils from 595Ma at Fortune Head Newfoundland.
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Dating techniques useful for dating rocks deposited millions of years ago mostly depend on the use of "index fossils" (fossils that are widely distributed but change enough over time to pin a date down fairly closely.)
Stoners rarely make good dates, but for a geezer like me the "index fossils" are usually ok.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately they aren't accurate. When you have a known decay rate for three different materials, after you calibrate for those differences in decay rate you should get the same answer between all three. Instead what you get is three wildly different numbers. How can you call that accurate?
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How wildly different? In science we almost never get the same answer; instead we get a statistical gradient (yet science still works!). I'm prepared to assume +/- 3% is a reasonable error for accuracy in some experiments, while you might require +/- 0.1%. Or an experimenter might draw false conclusions from the data, or the error might be so large as to invalidate the correlation he or she draws, or the method might be entirely discredited. Either way, the results are rarely glaringly obvious (otherwise we
Re:Dating methods are accurate! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My method of dating accurately is to have us both do a captcha that the other can see before we meet in person. Weeds out a lot of bots that way.
(Someone post the xkcd)
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:4, Funny)
[looking around]
Speak for yourself. I think I'd rather date the bot!!
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:4, Insightful)
Accurate smakurate! What we really need is a dating method that won't be rejected by anti-science types. Unfortunately, we all know that is impossible, because their objections are ideological, not scientific. So, we are left with only one option, which is to ignore the anti-science types.
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And now to find a dating method that is actually accurate.
I dunno my dating methods involves dinner and a movie, and it's pretty accurate (that is unless you take the girl to see Gigli)
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Costs too much money (over $40/month)
Re:Evolution finally refuted (Score:5, Funny)
Costs too much money (over $40/month)
Hate to continue this off topic thread here, but...
If you can't afford $40/month, you are not the kinda guy that the ladies on e-harmony are looking for.
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Probably not. c'est la vie.
And whether or not I can afford $40/month on eHarmony is beyond the point. The question is, would I be willing to pay that much even if I could afford it. The answer, surprisingly, is NO. I would not pay $120+/year ($40/month is a low ball figure) for a dating service.
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The ladies won't dig your math skills either...
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You best be trolling...
I was going to challenge your claims that radioactive isn't accurate, but I think I won't even bother now.
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...
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For making that comment, I'm gonna sic my pet Anomalocaris on you.
Dang - that thing is scary. I'm going to avoid making any "giant shrimp" jokes, just in case one might be listening.
Don't know but... (Score:5, Funny)
...because this is Slashdot this story will arise twice for sure. ;)
Life fills a space defined by its environment (Score:5, Informative)
Life creates itself to fit a niche, through a trial-and-error process called natural selection.
1. Does this mean life could arise twice, in similar form? Yes, and in fact there's evidence for parallel evolution:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100225214757.htm [sciencedaily.com]
2. Does this mean that life on other planets arises identically or near-identically to our own, or that the origin of life on earth comes from elsewhere? Possibly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia [wikipedia.org]
Basically, life adapting to similar conditions in different areas would have a similar "blueprint" although possibly different DNA reflecting a different route to that end.
Re:Life fills a space defined by its environment (Score:5, Insightful)
But scientists can usually tell different species. They may look superficially identical, but they have unique organs which indicate if it's the same species, or a different species that discovered the same niche.
I think the likely explanation here is that (1) it's the same species at ~500 and ~600 million years ago, and it did survive the extinction because (2) Snowball earth wasn't as harsh as we believe.... there were probably warm zones around the equator for a few sponges to hang-on.
Re:Life fills a space defined by its environment (Score:5, Informative)
OK, since I took the two seconds necessary to RTFA, the summary's title is wrong. TFA specifically says NOT that life evolved twice, but that the date the Earth was inhabited was pushed back.
Now I have to read your links, at least the first one. But as to the second,
Does this mean that life on other planets arises identically or near-identically to our own, or that the origin of life on earth comes from elsewhere?
There is no proof at all that life exists anywhere else except on earth. When and if we find life elsewhere, than we can make conjecture about panspermia, until then it's just science fiction. Not even junk science.
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There is no proof at all that life exists anywhere else except on earth. When and if we find life elsewhere, than we can make conjecture about panspermia, until then it's just science fiction. Not even junk science.
The fact that life exists on Earth indicates that it most likely exists elsewhere, since the probability of life isn't equal to zero, and there are a ridiculous number of stars and planets.
Basically, the burden of proof is on you to say that life exists only on Earth. That scenario is so unlikely as to not even be funny.
Re:Life fills a space defined by its environment (Score:4, Informative)
"Ridiculous number of planets" means nothing. For all we know the probability of life could be "ridiculously" small, so small indeed that multiplied by the total number of planets in the universe the product is still so small that life exists only on earth.
We have indications that this probability is very small. We have two examples of planets in our own stellar system that missed the habitable zone. Venus is so hot that complex molecules are unlikely to exist there. Mars is so cold that water cannot exist in liquid form. It has been conjectured that the moon was essential to the spontaneous creation of life on earth, because otherwise there wouldn't be tidal pools that concentrated the elements in the primitive sea.
Those are all conjectures, of course, and there may be counterpoints to them, but they are consistent with the hypothesis that life could be an extremely unlikely thing to happen in a planet. At this point the only sensible position is "we don't know" if life exists elsewhere.
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That's not quote true. We have lots of evidence that it isn't all that unlikely for life to arise given chemicals common to early systems like the Sun's. Until we discover a specific working path from amino acids to single-celled life, we can't say for sure, but a lot of that path is known and the odds are certainly better than one in a trillion, for example. There are a staggeringly huge number of stars like ours in the universe, so the number of planets we would expect to have life on them is large eno
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That's 1 cut above "given money, trees and an infinite universe, somewhere money does grown on trees"
No because life does exist here. Money doesn't grow on trees.
If money did grow on trees here, then given money, trees, and an infinite universe, its probable that money grows on trees somewhere else too.
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Plus as the late Mr. Adams postulated in his second book in the famous five-book trilogy, money can grow on trees, provided a culture adopts the leaf as its currency ;)
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No way! Whatever you think about the reasoning, saying 'The probability of life existing on a planet is greater than zero, therefore given enough planets the scenario of life existing on two of them becomes arbitrarily likely' is not in any way similar to saying 'if two classes of item exist, then given infinite space one class is capable of creating the other'. One lays out a premise and extrapolates from it, the other is just nuts.
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Give it some Heisenberg treatment. We cannot determine if life exists elsewhere, therefore for the purposes of meaningful scientific debate we have to act as if both possible realities are true. Anyone involved in that kind of discussion has to be equally ready for both possible outcomes.
We can't look to life on Earth as proof for or against life elsewhere.
OK, that's put paid for science (Score:2)
So far we have found life just about everywhere on this planet where long chain carbon molecules can be stable. We have found it using a variety of substrates to obtain energy, including oxygen and sulfur which are common in the universe. Even talking about "life" begs the question; the term i
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As I understand it a part of this is the assumption that animal life would be improbable to evolve twice. I always like to question assumptions - so let me take a different example and come back to the article shortly:
A very quick bit of research says that homo sapiens evolved from Homo rhodesiensis (common ancestor with Neanderthals). Now suppose I go back in time and kill off the first Homo Sapien that evolved, or at least exterminated any tribes that showed those leanings.
I would be astonished that in t
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Because evolution is full of dead ends, and species that diversify to fill their niches. Assuming that homo sapiens could have evolved "again" from h. rhodesiensis is not an incredible st
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I'm not implying that there is some true blueprint that we are evolving towards, but one need only look at current life on earth to suggest that a 6 fingered or tailed human evolving from rhodesiensis is very unlikely since they had neither.
I guess what I was getting at is that in the situation I posted humans would probably be almost identical if not completely genetically compatible with modern humans because the progenitor species would be identical in both cases. Now if I had gone back and killed the fi
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But these are mutations that still occasionally occur in h. sapiens - polydactyly occurs in ~1-in-500 births, I'm sure it could have happened to h. rhodesiensis as well... and really, the question is, would that difference be selected *against* enough that it would be ki
Re:Life fills a space defined by its environment (Score:5, Interesting)
I've read similar theories (Aquatic ape hypothesis [wikipedia.org]) that stated similar ideas about human evolution. They proposed that humans are poorly adapted to land (relatively speaking). We go through large volumes of water compared to other land based mammals. Humans require far more water and lose more water than most other land based species. We also have very little hair whereas most land based mammals are covered with it. We are also better adapted to water than other apes. The idea was that human ancestors may have been forced back into the oceans, at least partially. Possibly into shallow areas causing adaptions to develop that have changed us in some fundamental way compared to our Ape cousins.
I have always been intrigued by this theory.
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When and if we find life elsewhere, than we can make conjecture
Wow! The rare reverse-then-than typo! Seldomly seen in the wild, today we are witness to a rare treat.
Typoos are a bitch, aren't they?
Indeed. And I'm just chiding you in good fun, by the way, I mean no offense.
Re:Life fills a space defined by its environment (Score:5, Insightful)
No kidding. (Score:2)
From TFS:
Doesn't sound like he's wondering to me - in fact, it sounds like he's pretty much ruled it out. WTF?
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I have difficulty believing that the entirety of the oceans was frozen over during snowball earth. There are hydrothermal vents pumping out heat at more than 700degF. It's not terribly hard to imagine that even if the rest of the ocean was a block of ice, there would be liquid water in the vicinity of these vents. The lucky sponge that happened to settle down in the neighborhood of a vent before the ocean froze over would have a shot at survival assuming the liquid area around the vent was big enough to sup
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Does this mean life could arise twice, in similar form? Yes, and in fact there's evidence for parallel evolution:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100225214757.htm [sciencedaily.com]
I just read your link, and nothing in it suggests paralell evolution. How did you come to that conclusion? It speaks of rapid evolution when saltwater fish are trapped in freshwater lakes, they are comparing the DNA of two closely related species that come from a common anscestor.
Nobody in any of the fields related to biology (paleont
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Hey, they should add that as one of the loglines they use up top.
Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
Slashdot: It is what IT is.
Slashdot: TFA is interesting, TFS is garbage.
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I didn't read his link but the penguin and puffin are examples of parallel evolution. They both have similar colorings but aren't super closely related; the colorings are similar because both species evolved favoring the black/white/orange coloring due to their habitats.
Throw away the Snowball. (Score:5, Interesting)
More likely, this is evidence that there never was a Snowball Earth. We've never been sure whether the entire Earth froze up or just large areas of it. If creatures lived through the glaciation, that's a good indication that unfrozen regions still existed.
Re:Throw away the Snowball. (Score:5, Informative)
Don't trust Daily Mail interpretations of any thing scientific. Or non-scientific.
He was on the radio and said:
He did not consider dual evolution likely and would be surprised if anyone proposed it.
The dates were not certain, but they were much earlier than previously thought.
Earlier life existed, but only at single-cell level.
Heat was most likely provided by volcanic heating or hot water vents. (There are animals present now that have evolved to live in deep water near vents.)
Re:Throw away the Snowball. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. This. There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to be expected when a presumably scientific article is surrounded by such journalistic gems as "Brittany Murphy's mother 'shared bed with daughter's husband after her death'.
One's head asplodes, it does.
Re:Throw away the Snowball. (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the linked Wikipedia article, even the dating of the 'Cryogenian' period is pretty loose. People need to look at those solid lines separating geologic eras with a grain of salt or at least a Photoshop^HGimp gradient. It's not like God came down and said "OK it's now Cambrian time, lets pop out those hominids riding dinosaurs, and while your at it, lets change the color of the strata to mauve."
Right?
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what else are sponges going to do anyway?
I can think of a few things, involving 18 year old redheads, but that would be off-topic.
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It's not hard to imagine pockets of happy sponges in liquid water hanging around for millions of years (what else are sponges going to do anyway?).
Okay Jim, let's give the sponges a bottle of 409 and see if the lazy fuckers can clean up some of that oil!
Thanks,
Tony Haywired
VP of Desperation
Re:Throw away the Snowball. (Score:5, Informative)
***Don't trust Daily Mail interpretations of any thing scientific. Or non-scientific.***
I think you've nailed it. The article appears to be horribly garbled. FWIW, the earliest bacterial fossils are 3.8 billion years old. Fossilized microbial mats are quite common back for hundreds of millions of years before the first animals appeared. Some complex fossils -- probably multicellular colonial assembleges (but maybe not 'animals') of one sort or another -- Chuaria, Tawuia, Grypania --go back a very long time. I think that the oldest previously well established animals are whatever created tracks thru the sediments of the fossil assemblege at Fortune Head Newfoundland 595 million years ago.
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I thought that this was when Homer Simpson went back and time and sneezed.
Global Cooling Denialist!!! (Score:2)
But the consensus of climate scientists is that Snowball Earth happened, therefore it's unscientific to question it. Are you a Global Cooling Denialist?
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Water could only have frozen on the surface + geothermal vents to keep the sponges alive.
In case of wiki-vandalism (Score:2, Informative)
"Timeline of evolution" at 03:43, 16 August 2010 [wikipedia.org]
Note to Slashdot Editors: When used as references, Wikipedia links should be to a specific version of the article.
*At least* once... (Score:5, Insightful)
I then point out to them that *all* we know is that life has been created on this planet *at least* once. It may have happened a million times, for all we know. Out in that vast ocean, there are countless chances for it to happen every day and it very well *may* be happening. Who the hell knows? Any life that we may find out there in the oceans gets attributed to being descended from the *first* occurrence of life... but that might not really be the case.
So, this notion that life may have arisen twice? I don't find it shocking at all. Okay, I guess I'm a little piqued by the fact that researchers think that they hold *evidence* of it (since that's a little harder to do) but, like I said, I have a hunch this has happened millions of times since the "first time".
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One of the strangest Cr. arguments is that life never evolved from scratch in a sealed peanut butter jar. Despite being silly, it got me thinking: what would happen if it did? The person who discovered it would probably just toss it in the trash and nobody would ever know. It's not like everyone runs to the loc
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The peanut-butter-jar argument is actually about a trillion times stupider than even you blame it for. That idiot apparently think that "life" in its simplest form means germs, bacteria, single-cell organisms; and that fallacy belies his incredible ignorance (or intentional misinformation) of evolution. Evolution didn't go from amino acids to bacteria, it went through a bazillion steps in between. What we now know of as a single cell is certainly a conglomeration of different bits and pieces of self-replica
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I have a hunch this has happened millions of times since the "first time".
That was my reaction as well. "Why only twice?" If the conditions existed for amino acids to develop and combine, the odds of cellular and multi-cellular life occurring only once would have to be very small indeed. It's a huge planet at the microbial level. Heck, life probably came to be over and over and over again, regardless of whether another pond a kilometer away was having the same thing occur in it.
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There is conciderable evedence that all the life we know about is related. For example the direction that DNA curles should chemicly speeking be random, yet all known life has the same direction of curl. This implies a bias most easily explaind by all life having a common anscestor at some point. Whether or not life on Earth at one time formed in series and or parallel with several "first generation" life forms is an open question, but as yet there's lots of evedence in favor of the existance of a universal
Ok, let's back up (Score:2)
For one thing, even the (misleading) headline doesn't claim that life may have arisen twice. It asks the question whether sea life (in context, meaning multi-cellular sea-life such as sponges). And the headline and summary are, in fact misleading: the guy they're interviewing specifically says it's really unlikely sea animals evolved twice. Finally: read this article [wikipedia.org]. Among the interesting bits of data: based on genomic analysis, it's 10^2860 (not a typo) more likely that all extant life forms had a single
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I suppose there's room to mention the theory that life arises all the time but it gets gobbled up by the existing fauna, but we haven't seen it happen, and not for lack of looking.
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Agreed. Life arising, dying out completely, and arising again I could buy - if the earth went through conditions sufficient to sterilize everything.
Life starting 50X in parallel seems hard to fathom, when half the reason we're so sure that everything evolved is all the homologies. Where are all these creatures that aren't descended from a common ancestor? It should be completely evident in their biochemistry.
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I reckon that either possibility is. . . possible. The existence of extremophiles, and also plants and animals that are able to "survive" prolonged periods of poor conditions via morphology (spores, seeds) or biological processes (like hibernation), it's not unreasonable to believe that some animal life survived this prolonged event. Even the Martian climate, which is nearly universally unhospitable has niches where life could possibly exist. . . in warm, protected areas underground, water-bearing rock, e
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Which goes back to the whole "it could happen every day" stance -- lets pretend primitive proto-life does in fact come to be semi-frequently, quasi bacteria for example. What happens to these barely extant life forms when the rest of our "been put through the crucible for several million years" elaborate killing machines gets a hold of them? Hint: While I suppose spontaneously forming life as a semi-common process is *possible*, I would expect that even if true effectively none of it never reaches generat
Title a bit off (Score:5, Informative)
By law of parsimony, the most likely explanation is that sponges arose once, and survived. While it isn't impossible that two similar organisms evolved from the same organism to fill a niche, it is tough to show evidence that two identically structured organisms arose twice, at different times. Most often when this happens, it happens at relatively close time intervals in physically separated areas, with simple changes. Seeing evidence to the contrary would be amazing, but in molecular evolution and probabilistic modeling, the more assumptions you make, the less robust the results will be, and so far all we have is/are fossils with identical structures.
First link is trash (Score:2)
First link is to a trash tabloid-ish site per the ads I saw. Not exactly peer reviewed science.
All the squealing is oriented around the assumption that the date they calculated is correct, and then wanders into wild speculation.
However, the cruddy first link carefully avoided any discussion of screwing up the dating.
Its very easy to improperly date a rock. For example, you can properly calculate the date of individual sand grains. But, its a really bad idea to assume the age of the sand grains equals the
Re:First link is trash (Score:5, Informative)
Abstract:
It was peer reviewed, so I would suspect that their methods weren't trash.
Saddest Part (Score:4, Funny)
The saddest part of this story? No, not the tabloid link that gets vast parts of the story wrong. No, the saddest part is, thanks to a new obsession of my kids, I can't read this story about prehistoric sea sponges without singing "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea!"
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Who died in an oil spill because of BP?
Life 2.0 (Score:2)
Sea sponges? No... (Score:2)
How did they survive? (Score:3, Informative)
Forgive my trolling, but Dr. Maloof is an idiot. There are things called hydrothermal vents that certain species of sponge live around. So unless he thinks "Snowball Earth" involved the complete freezing of the oceans and, indeed, all other bodies of water, a hypothesis can easily be constructed to answer his question.
I think you're being a little hard on the guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, it seems there are two possibilities here: it could be that being "confronted by the question of how they survived" is a rhetorical device leading up to just such a hypothesis, even if they didn't publish it in the article. Or maybe you're just a lot smarter than the "idiot" (who's a paleontology PhD) quoted here. Which do you think is more likely?
This is worse than Piltdown Man (Score:3, Funny)
Sea Sponges "evolved" approx. 5000 years ago, along with the rest of the universe.
We all know about the scientific method. (Score:4, Funny)
The scientific method requires a known control. For carbon dating, there is external evidence that you can use to judge the accuracy of it (historical records) but for other dating methods, where is the known control? Don't feed me circular logic crap about the state of gases in strata beside fossils of a "known" age because that is a feedback loop. I was not born yesterday.
Not only have some of these gas based dating methods been thrown into question by the realization that cosmic radiation can speed up the radioactive decay of those gases but we do not have any way to verify the decay rate unaffected by cosmic radiation using the classic scientific method. There is no control old enough. We also do not know what concentration of those gases were when they were trapped in the rock let alone what they were even a couple hundred years ago.
Even if the scale of the rate of decay was accurate, there is no way to know what the started state was when it was trapped, whether that gas was trapped long before that strata formed and whether cosmic radiation has sped up the decay since it was deposited in the strata.
In a nutshell, you do not know for certain if a particular strata is 3000 or 90 million years old.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I was not born yesterday.
I am a believer of Last Thursdayism you insensitive clod.
There is nothing contradict the theory that the entire universe was created Last Thursday. With all the people with memories of events happening before Last Thursday, with memories of ancestors, the heirlooms, etc etc, every thing was created Last Thursday. With stars billions of light years away too, with light stretching all the way back to these stars from Earth, with fossils already buried in strata of rock, and with radio active elements alrea
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Yes we do. There are nuclides with half lives of billions of years. How do we know? Get a pure sample of some isotope and measure how much of it has decayed after a known period. If after one year one billionth of the nuclei has decayed we can calculate that after a billion years 63.2% of the atoms will have decayed.
We know which nuclides come from which ones. We have a well tested sequence that
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We do not know for certain if a particular strata was exactly 90 million years old, but a possible error rate of 30000:1 is not being passed off as credible research by any scientist in radioactive decay-based dating. For practical purposes, bell curves serve as a useful indicator of probability by showing a gradient of weight around a mean, not to prove that the leftmost infinitesimally improbable armpit of the curve represents any significant doubt to the central argument.
That is all very interesting but there is no known value to solve against. That error rate 30000:1 is something you or someone pulled out of their ass and now it is simply accepted dogma. Dogma is not the same as a known fact. If the rate of decay is allegedly millions of years, there is no way to prove or disprove it and therefore it should not be considered science but rather dogma. You can forget about the possibility of cosmic radiation if you like but the fact still remains that the decay rate is not v
regardless (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It would be interesting if life evolved before the moon was formed by that collision of the mars like planet and the early earth by hiding out there. It could have survived because it stayed in the nice warm chemical rich layers of the mantle.
Regarding bats (Score:2)
As many others in this thread have noted, the summary completely misrepresents the content of the article.
Regardless, there are many very interesting examples of parallel evolution. Startling to me was finding out that fruit bats and insectivorous bats are very much unrelated... meaning that true flight evolved at least twice in mammals. Pterosaurs and true birds, the same thing. What a wondrous universe we live in.
Prior art! (Score:2)
Imagine that the sponges that were here first filed for patent.
Now that's a good summary. (Score:2)
Mod article up.
simple explanation (Score:2)
it was a dupe
Dumbass Wording Alert (Score:2)
I saw a mini-series called Miracle Planet and it described a still forming Earth being bombarded where not only is the ocean completely vaporized [youtube.com] the Earth's crust was heated to sterilizing temperatures down t
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I... Get oversights and mistakes - and yes this be one - clearly the good doctor wants his work to get popular enough to go under enough scrutiny to find the mistakes.
However - I don't see what any of this has to do with God.
Re: (Score:2)
Haha - I totally meant to put "- and yes this could be one -"
Which makes it...
Well I want to say Ironic but then we'll spur that whole debate on whats Ironic and whats not.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Paper, Scissors, Meteor, you lose!
Re: (Score:2)
We deal in facts on Slashdot.
Since when?!?!
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Funny)
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.